In chapter 4, we investigate the prehistory of austerity, first as an absence in early liberal economic thought, and then as a definite policy in early to mid-twentieth-century economic theory. Austerity was not a policy consistently argued for from the seventeenth century onward, since the conditions of its realization—big states that spend lots of cash that can be cut—do not arise until the twentieth century. Rather, austerity emerges over time as a derivative consequence of other shared beliefs—a sensibility—concerning the nature and role of the state in economic life that sit at the core of liberal economic thought.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 268